Tony Castro's America

Remembering Michael Jackson

The following appeared as a column in the Los Angeles Daily News June 26, 2009, a day after Michael Jackson's death at his home.

Almost two decades ago, an actress friend and I posed as a grieving couple at a gravesite at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, all just to catch a peak of a fellow mourner.

In May 1990 Michael Jackson attended the burial of his much-loved grandmother.

I was being wooed, as it were, to write an unauthorized biography about the world’s most mysterious man since the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and I had insisted on at least getting a glimpse of the subject, if even from a distance, before I signed on.

As it turned out, I would have a face-to-face meeting with Michael Jackson himself, if only for a fleeting moment.

Michael was among the Jackson family members getting out of a limousine to attend the burial of his grandmother Martha Bridges, and his path to her gravesite took him directly past where we were standing, which we had known it would when we chose to stand there. When he was inches away, he slowed almost to a stop for a split-second and looked at us.

My friend, a gorgeous blonde from a popular TV show, could have that affect on people, which is why I had asked her to join me.

Michael was dressed in black except for a dark maroon shirt, sporting a black fedora under which his trademark black curls dangled over his forehead as if icicles of death. As he neared the tree shade approaching his grandmother's gravesite, he removed his sunglasses. He wasn’t wearing the surgical mask that had become a part of his wardrobe, and for an instant our faces couldn’t have been more than a foot apart.

Queen and King of the Prom

I can honestly say I escorted my wife to the prom! With Renee at her friend AJ McLean's prom-themed 40 birthday party at The Mark on LA's Westside.

 

How Jerry Brown Took Over Reagan Country

The San Fernando Valley voted solidly for Democratic candidates on Election Day, but by a smaller margin than the rest of Los Angeles, according to Loyola Marymount University's exit poll of voters.

Jerry Brown won 55 percent of the Valley vote for governor and Sen. Barbara Boxer took 58 percent, beating their Republican opponents among all voter groups, according to the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount.

Citywide, both Brown and Boxer took two-thirds of the vote.

And by a 50-48 margin, the Valley also supported the legalization of marijuana, though Proposition 19 was rejected statewide. (Some exit polling totals don't add up to 100 because of responses left blank).

The results show that the Valley has continued moving away from its historical conservative roots, but still remains less liberal than the rest of the city, analysts said.

"The San Fernando Valley was once Reagan country, but those days were a long time ago," said Martin Saiz, professor of political science at California State University, Northridge.

"The Valley hasn't been majority Republican for quite awhile. It's a different Valley. It's not the same Valley it was in the '70s or '80s or even the '90s."

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom also won the lion's share of local votes in the lieutenant governor's race. He beat Abel Maldonado, the Republican incumbent appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, by

a 52-39 margin in the Valley and 58-31 citywide.

One big reason for the city's Democratic dominance was the large Latino vote which, according to exit polls, went better than 5 to 1 for both Brown and Boxer over their Republican opponents.

GOP billionaire Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard exec Carly Fiorina each could garner only a fifth of the Latino vote in Los Angeles - an apparent repudiation for the Republican candidates' staunch opposition to immigration reform leading to citizenship, according to analysts.

Fernando Guerra, who heads Loyola's Center for the Study of Los Angeles, said he believes the gubernatorial election was decided by Whitman's handling of the issue over her former housekeeper - an illegal immigrant who worked for her for nine years.

Whitman, who claimed not to have known of her housekeeper's illegal immigration status during all that time, maintained she fired the woman when she finally learned she was in the country illegally.

"(Latinos) got a different narrative about Whitman," said Guerra. "To me that is what changed the election then and there. It wasn't just Latino voters, but especially Latino voters saw her challenged for the first time, and saw how she reacted."

Brown, who was governor from 1975-83, won the election with almost 54 percent of the overall vote, while Boxer won re-election to a fourth term with 52 percent.

Statewide, Brown and Boxer also received lopsided support from Latinos, according to polls conducted by Latino Decisions and sponsored by the National Council of La Raza, Service Employees International Union and America's Voice.

Those polls reported both Democratic candidates receiving 86 percent of the state's Latino vote.

Although the Loyola exiting polling did not inquire about the state attorney general race, officials said the strong Democratic trend in other campaigns indicates that the Valley also helped Democrat Kamala Harris overtake Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley in his home stronghold.

As of Wednesday, Harris, the San Francisco D.A., was leading in Los Angeles by more than 13 percentage points but she was barely clinging to a small margin statewide.

The Harris campaign attributed her success in Los Angeles to an intensive effort in the homestretch of the race.

"She all but lived in Los Angeles the last month," consultant Ace Smith said. "She spent every weekend in Los Angeles and made several trips during the week. It was old-fashioned hard work."

Smith said Harris also provided a more positive message to voters on what she would do as attorney general - particularly on environmental issues - while Cooley's campaign concentrated on attacks.

"He was using the death penalty and that is a decades-old battle that doesn't work anymore," Smith said.

Cooley's campaign maintained that the results are far from over.

"With the counties completing their semi-official returns, Steve Cooley trails Kamala Harris by 14,838 votes - two-tenths of a percentage point," Kevin Spillane, Cooley's consultant said in a statement. "There are over 1 million provisional and absentee ballots yet to be counted."

The voter turnout in Los Angeles County in Tuesday's election was 43 percent, according to the county Registrar-Recorder's Office.

The Loyola Marymount exit poll found that both Brown and Boxer were favored by upwards of 2-to-1 margins by men, women and white voters. Asian voters also heavily supported the two Democrats, and African American voters favored Brown and Boxer by more than a 9-to-1 margin.

The exit poll included surveys with 341 voters from the Valley, Loyola Marymount officials said, and had a margin of error on all questions of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Jim Bellows in Excelsis

The names most often associated with Jim Bellows, the fabled newspaper editor who died Friday at the age of 86, were Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe – the legendary journalists whose early careers he helped shape into the biggest bylines in the country.

But the names I most associate with Jim are those of three artists who became indelibly linked with him in my memory the night he hosted a cocktail party at his Brentwood home for all his new hires at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in February of 1978, not long after he became that newspaper’s editor.

In the broad living room of his impressive house on Rockingham Avenue, the original pop art works of two of those artists immediately bowled you over: Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Jim’s lovely wife Keven modestly accepted your compliments about their collection, while – over the squeals of kids running between them -- Jim offered self-deprecating anecdotes of how he had come to know the two artists, stories he delivered in mumbles and with hand gestures while gripping an elegant ebony cigarette holder in his teeth.

The squealing kids were running to their mother, a beautiful, WASPy blonde who happened to be an actress of some fame herself in the 1970s, Blythe Danner. She was there with her husband, Bellows’ friend and producer Bruce Paltrow, the older brother of one of the young reporters Jim had hired.

The Paltrows brought their brood over to introduce them to me and other Herald Examiner staff members, and one of them, even at the tender age of five, had a remarkable presence. Young Gweneth Paltrow would grow up to win a best actress Oscar in 1998 for “Shakespeare in Love.”

All of this is to say that my personal recollection of Jim is not so much tied to journalism necessarily as to fame, celebrities and beautiful people. For each big-name journalist whose name is linked to Bellows, you could also find the Hollywood famous. Jim ate it up, which was one of the reasons his Herald Examiner indulged in a Page Two gossip and celebs column long before many other mainstream papers.

Perhaps it is just to underscore that Jim had a unique appreciation for the lines and form of art and of people, which also included stylish writing and a penchant for undertaking underdog newspapers and trying to dramatically turn around their fortunes as if he were journalism’s Rocky

By the time he attempted to re-invent the Herald Examiner, he was already a legend for being the last editor of The New York Tribune, which many regarded as the ultimate writer’s newspaper in America, in large part because of the emergence of Wolfe and Breslin and the birth of a Sunday supplement which became New York magazine.

Those of us in that first group that came to work for Bellows at the Herald Examiner in 1978 – those who were at that February cocktail party – sought desperately to recapture with Jim those glory days at the Tribune, and some of us from that group and from later cadres at the paper reminisce romantically about the greatness of that period.

But the only times that period at the Herald Examiner possibly did recapture such magic was on the day Wolfe, in town to seal his movie deal for “The Right Stuff,” strutted alongside Jim through the newsroom, or the day Breslin visited the office while in Los Angeles during the 1980 presidential campaign.

Instead the real Herald-Examiner was, as Jim himself put it, playing at being a  metropolitan newspaper using smoke, mirrors and Band-Aids. There were big headlines, great graphics, blown-up photos and a lot of stylish posturing with overplayed stories, like the one about Bubbles, the hippo that escaped from the zoo.

Newspapers were information dinosaurs in their late Jurassic period, and Jim may have been the only one among us who knew it. I always sensed his heart wasn’t in the Herald Examiner. Not really, and some of us suspected taking the job at a newspaper that was already near collapse had been his way of getting closer to Hollywood where he later became managing editor of television’s “Entertainment Tonight.”

Bellows left the Herald Examiner after barely three years and in his final year, 1981, he called me into his office one day. He pulled a wad of newspaper clippings from his desk drawer and handed them to me.

“This is good writing,” he said. “You need to enter this in some of the contests.”
My head was swollen more than usual as I left his office all the way to my desk where, as I unfolded the clippings, I recognized them as a series I reported for the paper – in 1978.

“Oh, that’s Jim,” I recall his wife saying to me when I mentioned this incident to her the next time I saw her. “He doesn’t read the newspaper. He doesn’t have time. He relies on the judgment of some real good friends who give him feedback and tell him things.”

I took all of it then and now for what it was.

It wasn’t so much the journalism, at least at the Herald Examiner, which made Bellows the oversized, almost mythic figure he became in our minds. It was what he inspired through his vision.

He was like that Rauschenberg or the Warhol he had in his home – an irreplaceable work of art to admire.

Tony Castro, a staff writer for the Daily News, was a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner during Jim Bellows tenure as editor from 1978 to 1981.

Soccer Fans: Beckham, Si! Antonio, No!

Thank God for David Beckham and his timing. Arriving as he did and being introduced to fans in Carson Friday, the soccer superstar may have helped provide Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa with some perspective.

Antonio thought the worst of the fallout over his extramartial affair with disgraced Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas was over, especially after Thursday's uneventful day on his rounds of Los Angeles when reporters for the first time failed to ask him about the romance that killed his 20-year marriage.

There was a big sigh in the Villaraigosa camp at City Hall, and speculation grew among political watchers that perhaps the mayor had weathered the worst.

But then the news media has always been easy on Antonio.

Not the public, especially the 3,000 soccer fans who crowded into the Home Depot Center in Carson. When Antonio was introduced Friday, he was roundly booed. "It really came through on TV, and I'm told the mayor looked taken aback by the reception," wrote blogger Kevin Roderick, whose profiles of Villaraigosa and elsewhere have always been adoring.

A good barometer of Antonio may be Roderick's next Los Angeles magazine offering on the mayor, not to mention a barometer on Roderick's own credibility on how he covers Antonio.

The Man/The Myth: What Made Him Do It

Power and the feeling of invulnerability made Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa do it. That and his love affair with his image in the media and finding in Telemundo’s Mirthala Salinas the narcissistic reflection of himself.

“He had gotten to a point where he felt invulnerable and that he’d charmed his way into people’s lives and could do no wrong,” says Dr. Carole Lieberman, the Beverly Hills psychiatrist who has been paying special attention to Villaraigosa since last fall.

Lieberman, a nationally recognized expert in father-son and other family estrangement issues, also believes the Villaraigosa-Salinas relationship over which he has risked his political career is facing a crisis.

“What attracted her to him in first place was his political power and his power in general which is now shaken,” says Lieberman. “For him, her being a television personality, a TV anchor, a political reporter and star in the media is what he found attractive. She was a metaphor for the love affair he’s had with the media.

“But now that she’s on suspension and not on the air, it takes away some of her luster for him. Both of them are now stuck in relationship where their relationship has caused them to lose what it was that attracted them to each other. Now the question is question is: Are they still going to be in love or lust with each other?

“I guess we’ll see. If they are in love, will they be able to weather this storm? For Antonio, though, his first love is himself. If she is what will cause him to lose his political career, she will find that no woman will be worth it for him.”

Lieberman has never seen Villaraigosa professionally but has been studying his relationship with his estranged father and says it is the root of the mayor's motivation, both personally and politically.

“His betrayal of relationships and his lack of commitment goes back to his father,” says Liberman. “His father abandoned him and his family, and in his betrayal of his wife and his family, he is following in his father’s footsteps.”

Lieberman said she has also closely studied video of Villaraigosa’s recent announcements – on June 11 of the breakup of his 20-year marriage to wife Corina and on July 3 of his confirmation of his love affair with Salinas and found two troubling similarities.

“It’s bad enough that he seemed to announce he was getting a divorce without very much remorse, and he said it in this cavalier way in which you almost knew he was having an affair,” says Lieberman.

“And when he announced having an affair, again his voice sounded so happy, so much like the cat that ate the canary but expected people to be happy for him.”

Politics & Infidelity: Forgiving Their Trespasses

The city’s mayor had come into office with historic popularity that suddenly took a shot over one of the oldest indiscretions in politics. The mayor’s long marriage was in trouble. Worse, the faithful wife had filed for divorce. Worse still, there were rumors about another woman.

The mayor’s entire political career now seemed in jeopardy. Once regarded a frontrunner to succeed the incumbent governor and possibly even of national aspirations, his future had gone into crisis control mode.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa?

Hardly.

The mayor in trouble was then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now the frontrunner among Republican presidential candidates – showing that there can be political success even after divorce, infidelity and scandal.

“Giuliani broke the mold,” says national political watcher Steve Benan, who writes for Washington Monthly magazine. “Giuliani marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade with his mistress and then announced that he was getting a divorce in a press conference – before his wife knew anything about it.

“And his first marriage to a (second) cousin ended in an annulment.”

“Villaraigosa’s divorce and any scandal that may result wouldn’t be the death knell for his career. He could do the same thing Giuliani did and be back strong in the national (political) picture. What are the Republicans going to say when so many of their own have done the same thing or worse?”

Indeed, successful candidates with infidelity in their closet is a fairly new wrinkle in politics that should give encouragement to Villaraigosa backers and pause to naysayers who may have been too quick to suggest that the mayor’s marital breakup – and any scandal associated with it – could tarnish his rising political star.

The Los Angeles Times, until recently on an extended political honeymoon in its coverage of Villaraigosa, reported that “even some of Villaraigosa's closest friends say they do not expect him to emerge unscathed, particularly if more damaging revelations emerge.”

Even pundits like Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund "Pat" Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles, who usually makes nothing but positive assessments of Villaraigosa, warned that the mayor’s breakup could present problems if “this proves to be something that has legs.”

“If there is a nasty divorce with repercussions,” said Regalado, “then it becomes (politically) dangerous.”
Villaraigosa has admitted infidelity in the past – an affair that prompted Corina Villaraigosa to file for divorce in 1994.

A New Yorker profile on the mayor last month detailed how on the morning after his first political election -- an Eastside state Assembly primary -- Villaraigosa disappeared out of town with the wife of a campaign fund-raiser and mother of his godchild. Corina Villaraigosa, who was recovering from a reoccurrence of thyroid cancer, learned of the affair only after calling the campaign office looking for her husband.

Corina Villaraigosa immediately filed for divorce, leading to a separation that lasted almost two years.

In the wake of the Villaraigosas’ most recent breakup, the mayor has refused to comment on questions about another woman – setting off a fury of suspicion and curiosity about who the woman might be.

In the past week, speculation about the purported other woman’s identifications along with theories of the extent of the suspected romance have been continuing topics on KFI’s “Ken and John Show” as well as on the MayorSamSisterCity.com blog – both longtime critics of Villaraigosa.

It has been part of a feeding frenzy on the Villaraigosa breakup that, like all political divorces and scandals, may shock and titillate – but which surprisingly may not have a lasting impact on the futures of those politicians.

It is stunning given that as recent as 1988 a highly publicized extramarital affair killed the presidential campaign of then Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who at the time was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

But pundits like veteran Los Angeles political consultant Joe Cerrell say that today divorce and scandal may create headlines but that they no longer break political careers.

“It’s a new ball game,” says Cerrell. “All you have to do is look at Giuliani, and he’s not alone.”

They point to the top three polling Republicans in the presidential mix – Giuliani, Arizona Senator John McCain and former Tennessee Senator/actor Fred Thompson – as candidates who apparently have overcome divorces and, in the cases of McCain and Giuliani, scandal. Thompson, who is not yet a declared candidate, has been divorced twice.

Another GOP candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Gingrich, has been divorced twice amid scandalous circumstances. According to his first wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, the forced her to discuss the divorce terms while she was recovering from cancer surgery, according to her account.

Gingrich’s second divorce in 2000 came after an acknowledge affair with his current wife – which he admitted was carried on while he was pushing for Clinton's impeachment.

According to published reports, in 1979 McCain began courting a 25-year-old former cheerleader while still married and living with his wife who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam. McCain divorced his first wife, remarried the ex-cheerleader months later, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money.

About the same time, Ronald Reagan proved that Americans were willing to elect a divorced man as president. He had been married to the actress Jane Wyman before his marriage to Nancy.

Political historian Michael Beschloss says that from the beginning of the republic through the 1960s and early 1970s the press had kept stories of presidential peccadillos under wraps because "the tacit assumption was that the American people were not grown up enough to assimilate that kind of news."

But, says Beschloss, the Watergate scandal of political corruption illustrated how important character and integrity was, and that "if candidates can't bear up under full disclosure, they have no business being in politics."

Beschloss and others point to the 1990s and the extramarital troubles of President Bill Clinton as the time when the political climate for infidelity among politicians began changing to include a higher tolerance among voters for indiscretions in those areas.

“It wasn't until 2000 that McCain, possibly emboldened by Clinton's survival of his scandals, became the first confessed adulterer to have the nerve to run,” says Benen, whose also blogs at TheCarpetbaggerReport.com. “Now, just a few years after infidelity was considered a dealbreaker for a presidential candidate, the party that presents itself as the arbiter of virtue may field an unprecedented two-timing trifecta.”

Experts say it all augurs well for all politicians, especially rising darlings like Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has also been mentioned as a future gubernatorial contender. Earlier this year, Newsom admitted to an affair with the wife of his re-election campaign manager.

It also speaks to a curious phenomenon among voters, say experts -- that they will tolerate in their political leaders what they would not in their spouses.

“People have a certain image of a political leader and, if that image is strong enough, it can’t be shaken,” say Steven Mintz, co-chair of the Council On Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research think tank on families based at the University of Houston. “The image people have of Giuliani is that of a strong leader, and it’s helped him survive.”

Mintz also believes the country has gone through what he calls “morality fatique.”

“When something like this occurred the first time, society was disapproving,” says Mintz. “But then there’s a second time and a third and so on, and society gets accustomed.

“When Nelson Rockefeller ran for president (in 1964), his divorce destroyed his campaign. But by 1976, people were accustomed to politicians who had been divorced, and Ronald Reagan was able to make a serious run at the (Republican) nomination. By 1980, he could get elected without divorce being an issue.”

In fact, only a small minority of voters – mostly evangelicals and political conservatives -- actually do care about candidates infidelities.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 62 percent of Republican respondents but only 25 percent of Democrats said they would be less likely to support a candidate who had an extramarital affair in the past.

"Americans understand that political marriages are complicated -- that they're not exactly like every other marriage or romance under the sun," says "Usually, politicians are very ambitious. You have to be driven in ways that most people aren't. I would never say that all of these are marriages of convenience, but it's more common than in normal marriages."

Mintz also draws a distinction between Villaraigosa’s marital breakup and any possible new romantic precipitating it with the political demise of onetime Democratic darling Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and Clinton administration Cabinet member.

“Cisneros was haunted by an affair that ruined his political career,” said Mintz. “But what made his situation different was the financial shenanigans that showed this to be more than a sexual affair.”

Cisneros, according to reports and count documents, reached a secret agreement to buy his mistress’ silence, then lied about it to the FBI during his Cabinet appointment vetting – a felony that led to his forced resignation and plea bargain agreement, though Clinton later pardoned him in the final days of his administration.

For his part, Villaraigosa has made all the right crisis control moves, experts agree. Even his much-criticized press conference where he would not address questions about the breakup served its purpose – to publicly accept full blame for the failure of the marriage.

“I know it may seem like the end of the world for Villaraigosa right now,” says Benan, “but in the overall scheme of things, history is on his side.”

The Antonio Marriage Story That Never Ran

Submitted Jan. 18, 2007

BY TONY CASTRO
Staff Writer

Something looked different about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who looked tired even as he forced a smile and gripped the podium top with a hand on each side. It was more than the county seal on the front of the podium and the name imprinted above it: Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

It took a moment and maybe it only became obvious if you were looking for the smallest of tale-tell signs.

His left hand was missing the distinct gold wedding band that his wife Corina picked out for him and which he has worn for most of the past 19 years.

 
The date was Jan. 16, 2007, a week before the mayor’s birthday. He would commemorate turning 54. But the nagging question raised by the missing wedding band was whether he and Corina would celebrate their 20th anniversary later in the year.

 
At City Hall, Villaraigosa denied the absence of his wedding ring signalled any problems in his marriage. His office said Villaraigosa stopped wearing his ring because he had recently lost weight and had not had time to have the ring resized.

Historically, the coverage of marital troubles in the marriages of Los Angeles politicians has made for queezy stomachs among local mainstream journalists.

The 2003 breakup of then Mayor James K. Hahn, for instance, received scant coverage and apparently was first reported in a dot-dash column of The Wave, a community weekly in South Los Angeles which had long been a Hahn family stronghold.

“If Los Angeles worked like New York City, competitive pressures already would have flushed out any gossip involving the mayor,” Jewish Journal senior editor Howard Blume wrote at the time in his publication.

“Why is it in Los Angeles that the personal life of actor Robert Blake looms more newsworthy than the mayor’s? Is it a reflection of Los Angeles’ civic culture that the mayor barely seems to qualify as a public figure?”

Although reporters at the Daily News refused to pursue the story, Ron Kaye, then the managing editor and now editor of the paper, wanted to report the story and told Blume:

“If you’re going to step on the stage, you risk being totally exposed or revealed. I think the public should know fully the story of who Hahn is. And what his life is like and what happened to it. I think we have a right to know.

“Why do we talk about the personal lives of presidential candidates? It’s not because it’s the most important thing. We’re interested, and it becomes a form of symbolic language. When you step into the role of mayor in the media and glamour capital, you become part of the conversation.”

Today, says media ethicist Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute, the issue is one “most editors in traditional newsrooms would say (that) if there is a legitimate public interet in a public official’ marriage, we’ll cover it.

“Who’s living in governor’s mansion, who’s accompanying him to public functions? Are there allegations of immoral behavior? How will this affect his ability to do his job?

“Who’s the first lady of the city or of the state if he were to run for governor? A candidate’s spouse is often the subject of scrutiny because politicians run as a package. So that would be of legitimate public interest.”

 
If not wearing your wedding ban that you’ve worn for years is an indication of problems in a relationship, the Villaraigosa marriage hit the skids sometime late last summer, a little after a year after the mayor took office.

A review of photographs from several image services indicates that the mayor was last seen wearing his wedding ban last Sept. 5, at a major Los Angeles campaign rally for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Phil Angelides.

Hundreds of photographs of the mayor prior to that date showed him wearing a wedding ban, and photographs since that date show him without one.

And the last time the mayor and the city’s First Lady were photographed together was last May 26, when they appeared with then Mexican President Vicente Fox and his wife Marta Sahagun while they were in Los Angeles.

In the months afterward, at the 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards Aug. 27 the mayor arrived with 13-year-old daughter Natalia and at the 75th annual Hollywood Christmas Parade -- where the Villaraigosas rode together in the grand marshal’s car the previous year -- the mayor appeared with only his daughter and 17-year-old son Antonio Jr.

 
It was never a storybook marriage, though the news media’s retelling of how they combined their respective last names into a new one that would become historic in Los Angeles politics would give it a romantic fairy-tale aspect all its own.

In 1987, Antonio Villar, then a labor organizer, had proposed to Corina Raigosa, a 30-year-old Montebello school teacher, whom he described in a 2005 interview as the woman “I pursued relentlessly because I knew she was the woman I wanted to marry.”

“I was planning to take his name,” Corina later recalled. “I was planning to become Corina Villar. (But) he said, ‘Really? You’re going to take my name? But Raigosa is your name.’”

Corina thought about it and decided to keep her name, but also add his name, connecting them with a hyphen.

“I figured he was right,” she said. “This was my name. I had it for 30 years. This is who I am.”

Antonio mulled her decision for several days, then came up with another idea.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she recalled him telling her, “and why don’t we combine our names to make one name? If you are willing to take my name, I should be willing to take yours.’”

In feminist circles, especially, the story became a political plus.

But by the time, Antonio emerged as a household name in Los Angeles, the story of his marital infidelity leading to Corina fililng for divorce had become as well-known as the account of how they had combined their last names.

In 1994, on the weekend leading up to Antonio’s first election to public office, Corina Villaraigosa learned of an affair her husband was having with the wife of a Latino judge, who once had been Antonio’s study partner for the bar exam -- and who was helping raise money for Villaraigosa’s campaign.

Corina, who had been recovering from cancer surgery and treatment, filed for divorce just one day after Antonio won a hotly-contested election to the state Assembly. For the next two years, they lived apart before Corina, faced with the prospect of raising their two young children, took her husband back.

The Curse of Celebrity

When a photo surfaced early this year showing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a flirtatious Paris Hilton schmoozing at a post-Grammy party, their pairing was written off as Los Angeles' two biggest publicity hounds capitalizing on yet another photo op.

LAObserved.com, a media Web site that focuses on the city's movers and shakers, even ran a contest seeking the wittiest caption, then published a Letterman-like Top 10 list of what the mayor and the celebutante might be saying.

Few, however, gave any serious thought to the significance of the moment - the obsession Villaraigosa and Hilton have about being in the public eye and society's corresponding fascination with the politician who has sold himself as the poster child for the American Dream and the heiress who has lived it every day of her life.

Increasingly, in Los Angeles and across the country, celebrity has become the name of the game - transcending entertainment to encompass politics and public policy, as well.

"Celebrity worship has become big business," says psychologist James Houran, an author and nationally recognized expert on celebrities and celebrity worship. "But from a social standpoint, it's not healthy.

"Are you looking at Paris Hilton just because she is attractive or because you want the intimate details of her life and want to be part of her inner circle? "And socio-political leaders are just as popular as celebrities because of the political power they have. Celebrities have power, but not in the same way. Their decisions and actions influence us in very direct ways."

Last week, when the Hilton case erupted onto the national consciousness, it marked the crossover of two more local political figures into the realm of celebrity from which neither of the two - Sheriff Lee Baca and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo - shied away.

On national television, Baca - a regular fixture at local celebrity events who has proposed involving the Sheriff's Department in no fewer than five reality TV shows - defended his controversial decision to release the hotel heiress prematurely to her Hollywood Hills estate.

"The only special treatment is that because of her celebrity status, she got more time," said Baca, who maintains that Hilton got a stiffer-than-average sentence for violating probation for a reckless-driving conviction.

At the other end of the spectrum was Delgadillo, a rising star in Latino politics while Richard Riordan was mayor in the 1990s who has since been overshadowed by Villaraigosa's magnetism and showmanship. Having lost his bid for state attorney general last year and due to be termed out of his current office in 2009, Delgadillo had been courting publicity when he happened upon Hilton's early release.

"This was a perfect opportunity for someone in Rocky Delgadillo's position to pounce on, to capitalize for his own celebrity," says Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, a specialist on celebrity and fame.

Celebrity value

Today, celebrity has also become a self-generating commodity that Lieberman says might account for the meteoric rise of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat with only two years in Washington, to be considered a serious contender for his party's presidential nomination.

"People like Paris Hilton are famous for being famous, and there is a value being put on just how famous you can be," she said. "It doesn't have to be for any accomplishment except for getting the cameras to follow you around.

"In the case of Barack Obama, it's almost been like he's been feeding on himself. He's been able to gather air time because he's charismatic and he's black and he's attractive and young, and that's just fed into more air time and more media obsession."

Experts say the obsession with celebrity has permeated every aspect of the country's culture, with a special impact on teens and adolescents.

Limousine services enjoy an economic boost in the spring, when the luxury cars are rented for teenagers trying to make celebrity-style red-carpet entrances to their proms and graduations. YouTube.com, MySpace.com and similar Web sites have become magnets for teens attempting to take on Hollywood-like personas, and politicians are following suit.

Craving sizzle

In the 2004 presidential election, the Internet was used by candidates simply as a way to raise money. This time around, candidates realize the capacity to reach existing and potential supporters, and have made the Internet an integral part of their operation.

In Los Angeles, no politician has embraced celebrity more than Villaraigosa, meteoric rise has been built on his television-age magnetism, unrelenting ambition and a Clinton-like scripting of overcoming an early life of abandonment and abuse. Not to mention a fawning news media.

"He gives us the sizzle we didn't know we craved after a dozen years of bland white guys named Dick (Riordan) and Jim (Hahn)," journalist Kevin Roderick wrote adoringly of the mayor in last December's Los Angeles Magazine. "Villaraigosa's brand of inclusive politics fits right into this metropolis of a thousand cultures, one of them being the cult of celebrity.

"Villaraigosa possesses the star power to adorn the cover of Newsweek, play himself on `George Lopez,' and share a joke with Tony Blair. For once we have a leader who is recognized on the Westside, the Eastside and the East Coast."

Villaraigosa's celebrity and appeal played such an integral part of the 2005 mayoral campaign that on election night, a humbled and defeated incumbent James Hahn lamented, "You know, maybe I have a charisma deficit disorder ... ."

Charisma's draw

The role of charisma in the Villaraigosa-Hahn campaign, experts say, was eerily similar to that in the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Gray Davis gubernatorial recall campaign in 2003, when the action star's magnetism helped him unseat an undynamic governor who had just been re-elected a year earlier.

"Together, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa may represent what voters see as a model for political leadership in California - the charismatic consensus-builder whose powers of persuasion enable him to transcend the institutional weakness of office and rise above partisan gridlock," Tom Hogen-Esch, assistant professor of political science at California State University, Northridge, wrote for HispanicVista.com.

"By replacing traditional candidates for governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles with candidates of exceptional charisma, consensus-building, stamina and, perhaps, vision, voters may have significantly raised the bar for future political leadership in the state."

Much of the first two years of Villaraigosa's tenure as mayor was marked by his exhausting schedule and omnipresence, especially at celebrity and Hollywood red-carpet events.

To deal with chronic vocal cord problems, he began visiting a throat doctor, whose patient list includes several famous singers.

But in making a homestretch plea for L.A. to host the 2016 Olympic Games, he may have overreached in boasting about the recent signing of soccer superstar David Beckham by the Galaxy.

"We've got the beaches, the glitz and the glamour, and now we even have David Beckham," he told the U.S. Olympic Committee.

"Celebrities I think are fine, but I think the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee will be focused on the games that you can provide, the venues and the experience your games will deliver," countered Patrick Sandusky, a spokesman for rival Chicago, which ultimately got the USOC nod.

It is an example that celebrity can have its pitfalls for politicians - as Baca is learning from the backlash to his involvement in the botched attempt to free Hilton, experts say.

In addition to the criticism for his role, Baca now faces the prospect of a recall and possibly a slew of lawsuits from inmates who feel they received discriminatory treatment while in jail.

"He's fallen into the swamp that seems to happen to all public people when dealing with celebrities," says Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton.

"It's the blind spot in Los Angeles politics. If indeed it is, it is a relatively new blind spot, with politics and celebrity having taken a heightened status during the years when Bill and Hillary Clinton became fixtures in Hollywood, as well as the increasing importance of star-studded fundraising for national campaigns in California.

Veteran political consultant Joe Cerrell, whose political involvement dates back to Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential bid, says that while charisma and personality took on a life of its own during the historic nationally televised debates of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, it might have been the more recent changing focus of a revolutionized news media and television that has ultimately transformed politics.

"It may have started with Kennedy," Cerrell says, "but (President Ronald) Reagan had an impact on changing the way politicians were viewed and talked about. Now, in the last few days, what you hear more and more is people talking about Paris Hilton and Villaraigosa in almost the same breath."

On the same day Hilton was ordered back to jail, Villaraigosa announced that, despite adamant denials to the contrary in recent months, he and his wife, Corina, were separating after 20 years of marriage.

On Monday, even as Hilton's incarceration continued to dominate local and national newscasts, Villaraigosa publicly accepted blame for the demise of his marriage.

On Tuesday, Corina Villaraigosa filed for divorce citing "irreconcilable differences."

"In these times, when you see divorced politicians running for president like (Rudolph) Giuliani, (John) McCain and Fred Thompson, it's not a death blow to his political career," Cerrell said. "It's just sad that this is the cost public life has extracted."

In Villaraigosa, that public life at times has meant long hours away from home but in the worshipping presence of fans.

One recent party was especially telling. In a room crowded with people, Golden Globe-winning actor Martin Sheen, a film veteran and star of NBC's acclaimed "The West Wing," stood against a wall - alone. Nearby, Villaraigosa held court, surrounded by autograph-seekers.

Fame experts like Houran say this phenomenon is the outgrowth of the public's obsession with celebrity and a narcissistic connection to stars and attractive public figures. "People are always drawn to actors, sports figures and political leaders because of their looks," said Houran, who pioneered research at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in 1998 and was part of a national team of scholars who studied celebrities and their impact on human behavior.

"Good-looking people are treated differently - they're treated better. Society tends to ascribe all kinds of wonderful traits to them. And when you connect beauty with success it makes people believe that what looks good must be good, and (they) aspire to have what they have," he said.

"This is even more true in politics. Politicians who look good and sound good tend to be more connected with people than regular celebrities. Ultimately, a good-looking, charismatic politician is the consummate celebrity."

A Presidential Candidate and His Roots

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson may not have the money to compete with the "rock stars" of the presidential campaign, but he showed he has the sense of humor Monday night at a Hollywood fundraiser.

Richardson entertained supporters -- among them City Councilman Tom LaBonge -- at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe with an anecdote about his 93-year-old mother -- who is Mexican and still lives in Mexico.

"My mom, God bless her, is getting along in years, and sometimes she has difficulty remembering. Well, when I called other day, she asked me, 'Are you still governor?" Richardson recounted. "'Yes, mother, I'm still governor. They didn't impeach me yet.' And then she says, how's your sister? And I said, 'Fine.' And then she asked, 'Are you still governor?' And I said, 'Yes, mother.' And I said, 'Mother, in fact, I've told you this, but I'm going to tell you again. Two months ago, I announced for president.' And she said, 'El presidente de que, hombre!'"

Richardson also cleared up his California roots. He was born in Pasadena, but it turns out his California residency was brief.

"Most of California doesn't know that I'm Hispanic, but I'm working on it," he said, explaining that he had appeared on several Spanish radio shows, "and I'm going to be with George Lopez Saturday."

"My father was an American, and he had this complex -- that he wasn't born in the United States. He was born in Nicaragua... So he said, I am not going to permit my son not to be born in America. We lived in Mexico. He was working there. So what they did (when my mother was due) was to get in the car and drive up here. So I was born where (my father) had a sister -- at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena.

"So I was born there and we went right back. Right after I was born, we stayed a day and we went back. And last night, there was a fundraiser for me at (filmmaker) Moctezuma Esparza's. He's in Pasadena. He has a house there. And this woman from Huntington Hospital says, 'Well, governor, we'd like to do a fundraiser here at Huntington Hospital, and you can talk about your roots in Pasadena.' My roots were about four hours!

"But now that California is one of the first primaries, my roots are going to increase. I'm a native son!"

(Photo: Lucy's El Adobe owner Lucy Casado with presidential candidate Bill Richardson.)